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3D TV: The early cracks are showing

You won't be seeing Tiger Woods' comely wife Elin in three dimensions in your living room this week even if you have a new 3D television, silly glasses and the right cable subscriptions. That's because she won't be attending the Masters Tournament--the much-hyped 3D event of the year (so far) for reasons that have filled the gossip pages for months.

But even if she had decided to attend and show support to her man, she might not appear in all her glory--at least according to one early reviewer who went to great lengths to catch the "action" (it is a golf tournament) in three dimensions. "Actually watching it in 3D was a disappointment," said Michael Miller in PC Magazine, describing herculean efforts to watch the event only to find "it looked a little artificial--more like a game than real life" adding "everything appeared to be in worse resolution than normal HD images. In some shots it was hard to actually see the ball."

Obviously these are early glitches that can be corrected. Perhaps more disconcerting for those basing their futures on the idea of a public flocking to the new multi-dimensional broadcast format is an opinion piece from a college newspaper that skewers the whole notion of 3D--whether on TV or in the movies. The item, written by a graduate student in the Purdue Exponent, concludes "maybe the next version of the iPhone will be 3D capable. Now that's an idea I could go for!" Probably not exactly what all those marketers eager to hook the early adopter college-set were hoping to read.